"So he really did go to a counsellor, after that blowup with Pru. "
"Yes, to everybody's surprise. And even more surprisingly, Nelson seems to like him. Respect him. It's a black man."
Harry feels a jealous, resentful pang. His boy is being taken over. His fatherhood hasn't been good enough. They're calling in the professionals. "For how long is the rehab?"
"The complete program is ninety days. The first month is detox and intensive therapy, and then he lives in a halfway house for sixty days and gets some kind of a job, a community-service sort of thing probably, just something to get him back out into the normal world."
"He'll be gone all summer. Who'll run the lot?"
Janice puts her hand over his, a gesture that feels to him learned, coached. "You will, Harry."
"Honey, I can't. I'm a sick son of a bitch."
"Charlie says your attitude is terrible. You're giving in to your heart. He says the best thing is a positive spirit and lots of activity."
"Yeah, why doesn't he come back and run the lot if he's so fucking active?"
"He has all these other fish to fry these days."
"Yeah, and you seem to be one of them. I'm hearing you sizzle."
She giggles, along with the ugly tears drying on her face. "Don't be so silly. He's just an old friend, who's been wonderful in this crisis."
"While I've been useless, right?"
"You've been in the hospital, dear. You've been being brave in your way. Anyway as we all know there are things you can't do for me, only I can do them for myself."
He is disposed to argue this, it sounds pious in a new-fashioned way he distrusts, but if he's ever going to get back into the game he must let up and avoid aggravation. He asks, "How did Nelson take your getting tough?"
"Like I said, he liked it. He's just been begging for the rest of us to take over, he knew he was way out of control. Pru is thrilled to think he's going to get help. Judy is thrilled."
"Is Roy thrilled?"
"He's too little to understand, but as you say yourself the atmosphere around that house has been poisonous."
"Did I say poisonous?"
She doesn't bother to answer. She has straightened up and is wiping her face with a licked facial tissue.
"Will I have to see the kid before he goes?"
"No, baby. He's going tomorrow morning, before we bring you home."
"Good. I just don't know as I could face him. When you think of what he's done, he's flushed the whole bunch of us, not just you and me but his kids, everybody, right down the toilet. He's sold us all out to a stupid drug."
"Well, my goodness, Harry – I've known you to act selfishly in your life."
"Yeah, but not for a little white powder."
"They can't help it. It becomes their life. Anyway, evidently they were buying drugs for Lyle, too. I mean drugs for his illness – medicines for AIDS you can't buy yet in this country and are terribly expensive, they have to be smuggled."
"It's a sad story," Rabbit says, after a pause. Inky depression circulates in his veins. He's been in the hospital too long. He's forgotten what life is like. He asks Janice, "Where are you going now, in that snappy blouse?"
She rolls her eyes upward at him, from the mirror of her purse as she fixes her face, and then her face goes wooden and stubborn, bluffing it through. "Charlie said he'd take me out to dinner. He's worried I'm going to crash, psychologically, after all this trauma. I need to process."
"Process?"
"Talk thins through."
"You can talk them through with me. I'm just lying here with nothing to do, I've already missed the sports section of the news."
She makes that mmmm mouth women make after putting on lipstick, rolling her lips together in a complacent serious way, and tells him, "You're not impartial. You have your own agenda with Nelson, and with me for that matter."
"What's so impartial about Charlie, he wants to get into your pants again. If he hasn't already."
She pops the lipstick back into her bomb-shaped pocketbook and touches up her new hairdo with her fingers, glancing from several angles at herself in the mirror, and snaps the lid shut. She says, "That's sweet of you, Harry, to pretend to think I'm still interesting to anybody in that way, but in fact I'm not, except maybe once in a while to my own husband, I hope."
He says, embarrassed, for he knows he's been letting her down in that department lately, "Sure, but you know, for a man, it's all a matter of blood pressure, and -"
"We'll talk about it when you're home. I told Charlie I'd meet him at seven -"
"Where? The salad bar that used to be Johnny Frye's? It's only two blocks from here. You can walk."
"No, actually. There's a new Vietnamese place out near Maiden Springs he wanted to try. It's a bit of a drive and, you know me, I'll probably get lost. And then on top of everything I have fifty pages of a book on British realty law, full of all these funny old obsolete words, I have to read before class tomorrow night."
"You won't be home tomorrow night? My first night home?" He is making a complaint of it, scoring points, but he wishes she'd go and leave him alone with the television screen.
"We'll see," Janice says, rising. "I have an idea." Then she asks, "Aren't you proud of me?" She bends forward to press her hot busy face against his. "Managing everything the way I am?"
"Yeah," he lies. He preferred her incompetent. She leaves with her jonquil-yellow new coat over her arm and he thinks she is gaining weight behind, she has that broad-beamed look women of the county wear when they come into their own.
Harry watches what is left of Tom Brokaw and is settling into a seven-o'clock show on life in Antarctica when, of all people, the Harrisons come visiting. Not just Thelma – she's brought Ron along, or Ron has brought her, since she is thinner and sallower than he has ever seen her, and moves as if every step might break a bone. She smiles regretfully; her eyes apologize for the shape she's in, for Ronnie's being with her, for her being unable to stay away. "We were here in the hospital seeing my doctor," she explains, "and Ron junior had heard you were in."
"For what they call a little procedure," he says, and gestures toward the chair Janice has pulled up to the bed and that's probably still warm from her broad beam. "Ron, there's that big padded chair over in the corner if you want to pull it over; it's on wheels."
"I'll stand," he says. "We can only stay a minute."
He is sullen, but Rabbit didn't ask the Harrisons to come visit and doesn't see why he should be bullied. "Suit yourself." He asks Thelma, "How are you?"
Thelma sighs elaborately. "You know doctors. They never admit they don't have an answer. I'm on home dialysis twice a week, Ronnie's a saint to put up with me. He took a course on how to cope with the machine."
"Ronnie always was a saint," Harry tells her, everybody in the room knowing that Ronnie Harrison was just about his least favorite person in the world, though he had known him from kindergarten. A dirty-mouthed plug-ugly even at the age of five, and now bald as a prick's tip, with wisps above his big droopy ears. Ronnie in high school and afterward had a certain chunkiness, but the approach of old age has pulled the chunks like taffy, leaving hollows in his face and lumps and a painful stringiness around the throat. Harry says, as if she doesn't already know, "Janice is taking courses too, to learn how to sell real estate. I guess so she has a trade in case I pop off."
Thelma's eyelids flutter, a bony hand wearing a wedding ring gestures the possibility away. The sicker she gets, the more driedout and schoolteacherish she looks. That was one of the jokes of her being his mistress, her looking so prim and being so wild in bed, but maybe the real her was the schoolteacher and the other was put on purely for him. "Harry, you're not going to pop off" she tells him urgently, afraid for him. That strange way women have, of really caring about somebody beyond themselves. "They do wonderful things with hearts now, they stitch and mend them just like rag dolls." She manages a thin smile. "Want to see what I have?"